The Humanity Project (5 page)

“I could help you lie down.”

“No, I think I want to stay more awake.” He felt not sleepy, but vague, weak, diffuse. “What I really need is—”

“OK. Let me give you a hand.”

The boy bent down and helped pull Foster out of his chair, then slow-walked him to the bathroom. Foster was aware of the boy’s smell—something faint but unpleasant, unwashed clothes or unwashed body—he hadn’t noticed before. Well, boys. What did you expect. They reached the bathroom and the boy said, “I can wait outside. Call if you need me.”

For which Foster was grateful. He’d had enough of strangers helping him pee, watching him pee, enough of not being able to pee or not being able to stop, a whole universe of piss he hadn’t been aware of until his troubles began. He closed the bathroom door, supported himself on the sink, and then the windowsill, and in this way managed to do the chore standing up, although there had certainly been days when this was not possible.

He flushed, got his clothes together, ran water in the sink, avoiding as much as possible the mirror above it. He couldn’t escape it entirely. A gray-faced skull peered sideways at him.

When he came out, he didn’t see the boy. Too tired to worry much about it, he hitched his way into the den and lowered himself onto a couch. The windows here faced the backyard. He saw the boy rolling up an extension cord into a coil, then scuffing around in the beds he’d raked.

The back door opened. Feet crossed the kitchen, halted.

“I’m in here,” Foster called, his voice coming out thin and piping. Ridiculous.

The boy looked in at the door. “I was just clearing some things away.”

Foster lifted a hand: Fine.

“The lady said you’d pay me.”

Foster opened his eyes—he was not aware he’d closed them—sighed. “How much?”

“Thirty-five. It’s OK. I was going to hang out and wait for her anyway. You know, in case you needed anything.”

“Desk.” Foster pointed. He couldn’t get air all the way into his chest.

The boy scanned the desktop, held up Foster’s wallet. “This?” He crossed the room with it. “But, listen, I’m sorry if the dog got in your way. He didn’t mean to hurt you.”

Foster shook his head. He wanted to say, the dog hadn’t done anything to him. Or only in the most roundabout way, since if the dog had not been in the yard, Foster would not have stepped outside as he had. But maybe whatever had gone wrong would have gone wrong anyway, in the bathroom or standing at the refrigerator or arguing with his wife. Whatever it was didn’t feel like the cancer, unless all the burning and poisoning and cutting they’d done to smack the cancer down had made something else in him fail. He hadn’t wanted to think it, and now the thought took root in him. So this was how it would happen. A bad thick taste was climbing up the back of his throat. He would have the boy call the doctor, because in spite of all his cheap, brave posing he was getting scared. He said, “Dogger.”

The boy held the wallet out to Foster, then, when Foster didn’t take it, he set it down next to him. “You could give me less, on account of the dog. I completely apologize for that. I hope you aren’t too mad about it. Because I’d really like to do some more work for you guys. Also if you know anybody else around here who needs yard cleanup, fencing, anything like that.”

Foster let his head fall back against the couch. It was easier to breathe that way. His hands had been fisted and now he let them uncurl. There was something about a dog?

Dogdead dogdead dog.

“I’ve been trying to get a business going, you know, landscaping. People sure have nice yards in this place.”

The boy waited to see if Foster meant to answer. When Foster didn’t, he said, “Everybody has these great houses. This whole town is like, people here have it made. You drive around downtown and look in the windows of all those restaurants, everybody having a good time, eating and drinking, you’d think the whole world was one big party. You wonder where these people get all their money. Sorry. That was kind of rude of me. I didn’t necessarily mean you.”

Another space of waiting. The boy said, “Twenty-five bucks. Even twenty, that would be something. Maybe I should just shut up and let you rest.”

Not just dog. All the poor dumb, baffled, nearly extinct creatures. They tried fighting back, making their noise. Roar, said Foster. Roaring here.

“Sir?”

Foster said, Afraid. The boy leaned over him, trying to make out the sound Foster was producing. There was that smell again, stale boy. Or maybe it was his own stink.

Afraid.

It did not take very long at all for Foster to die, not as the boy or anyone else watching would have measured it. Enough time for more of Foster’s weakened blood vessels to give way and his secret bleeding to run its course. The boy had only just begun to realize there might be something serious happening here, something alarming, some mistake resulting from his inattention, and by then it was all over.

But for Foster, it went on and on. There was a sensation of something rolling, something heavy and extremely slow, along a chute or track, and once it reached the end, another rolling object took its place, and then another, and they were not thoughts, but the spaces between his thoughts. The frightened animal within him quieted. He had not wished to bother with thinking, and now the capacity to do so was leaving him. He recognized this new condition from his time within the bush. It was Not Be. It was a weight rolling away, a little heavier every time. The weight balanced on an edge and then dropped off. Not Be would allow you, if you wished, to look down on the leftover husk of yourself with gratitude, and in the last choice available to him, he so chose. His breathing had already ceased, and now black stars exploded behind his eyes. Then one by one, went out.

The boy had never seen a dead person before but there was no mistaking it, and soon enough he realized that nothing could be done. He took a few steps away from Foster, whose name he had not known, then back again. He spent some time looking at Foster, taking him in. With every moment, he seemed to become a little more dead.

Foster’s wallet was on the edge of the couch where the boy had left it. Now he picked it up, opened it, and sorted through the bills. Then he stopped, replaced the money, and put the entire wallet in his back pocket. He went to the desk in the corner and rummaged through the drawers, finding those things worth taking. He left the room and from other parts of the house came more sounds of opening and shutting.

Finally, in the kitchen, he looked into the refrigerator and took some packaged lunch meat and a brick of cheese. From the cupboards he picked out a few canned things, boxed things, then loaded everything into a plastic garbage bag he found beneath the sink. He let himself out the back door, careful to flip the latch so that it locked behind him.

The truck started up, accelerated smoothly down the driveway, and was gone.

The house went about its business as before. The thermostat registered a drop in temperature and sent a warm wind through the vents. The water pressure in the pipes maintained itself. Electric current whispered in the wires behind the walls. The refrigerator’s motor cycled.

The phone rang, and after the fourth ring the answering machine clicked on, unspooling its recorded message. Foster’s voice said, “Sorry, we can’t come to the phone right now, but leave us a message at the beep.”

Foster’s wife came on the line. “Lou? Are you there?” A listening silence. “I wanted to remind you about your medicine. Lou?” Her voice rose. “I know you can hear me. Or maybe you’re in the bathroom? Anyway, you need to call me back.”

The silence flattened. It could almost be heard, as if it were itself a sound.

“Lou?”

A
rt Kooperman had been teaching himself Vietnamese:
Hoan ngênh,
welcome;
Chào anh,
hello! He often got takeout from the Saigon Palace, and he thought it would be nice to be able to speak to the people there in their own language. And anyway, learning Vietnamese was the kind of knowledge-for-its-own-sake project he enjoyed. He was practicing some of the basic phrases,
,
good morning
;
how are you? as he stood just beyond the security entrance at the San Francisco airport, waiting for his daughter’s plane to arrive.

Not that his daughter was Vietnamese or anything. She was a normal, vanilla-flavored American. He should have been thinking about what to say to her, or getting his head wrapped around the imminent fact of her, but these were the last free moments he had, his last appearance as a nonparent, responsible to no one but himself, entirely unconcerned with his minor child’s nutrition, hygiene, education, socialization, not to mention her seriously fucked-up behavior.
please speak more slowly.
please write it down.

He didn’t know what she looked like these days. In his memory she was still a chubby, staggering two-year-old. Too late, he realized he should have asked them to send a picture. Maybe some other, less problematic fifteen-year-old girl would show up to claim him as her father, and maybe his daughter would attach herself to some other, more competent dad, and everything would work out for the best, since the chain of events and bad decisions that had resulted in her arrival, indeed in her very existence, was turning out to be the greatest dismal circumstance of his whole shitcan life.
Help!

But then, he had to keep in mind the absolute evil of what had happened to her.

His daughter was coming to stay with him as a kind of test drive, an exile, a visit of uncertain length. She had been having difficulties, and these difficulties had been explained to Art during an alarming phone call from his ex-wife, Louise. The fact of Louise calling was alarming in itself. It served him right for being incautious enough to keep the same phone number all this time, and for assuming that since Louise had not called him for more than ten years, she was finally off his case.

At one point in the phone call, Art had been imprudent enough to ask, “Well, is she seeing a counselor or anything?”

There was a silence, and he could hear Louise debating whether or not he was even worth the effort of sarcasm: My God, counseling! Why didn’t we think of that? Instead she said, “All the kids got counseling.”

Then she said, “Do you think I would call you if I wasn’t desperate? We can’t keep her here anymore, it’s not fair to anybody, especially Jay, can you imagine how Jay feels? He lost his own daughter.”

Art had begun to say something along the lines of commiseration when Louise added, “That’s usually thought of as a tragic thing. Losing a child. You think I’m rubbing it in? Fine. I am.”

They both listened to the silence for a time, then Art said, “What makes you think I’d know what to do with her? That I’d be any good at it. Huh?”

“She’s going to end up in a juvenile facility, some horrible state-run program, if we don’t get her out of here. Not to mention one more marriage blowing up in my face. There’s your answer. And I’d like to think you’d want to help her. Maybe I’m wrong. Feel free to correct me.”

“There’s not a lot of space where I live,” Art said, regretting the words as soon as he spoke. No excuse was going to save him.

Louise said, “Honestly? Even if I tried to take you to court for, what, a hundred thousand dollars of child support, you can’t get blood out of a turnip. Guilt? That’s probably going to last you about twenty minutes after you get off the phone. So how about, this is a chance for you to do something different. Be somebody different. A good guy. A father. Oh, I guess I shouldn’t assume. Do you have any other children?”

“Just her,” Art said, feeling as if he were making a damaging admission of some sort.

As if he should have had more children, or no, if he did, Louise would find some way to use that against him, as in, she hoped he provided better for them than he had their own daughter. Or say he was a model parent to these other, nonexistent children, how did he justify his total neglect of Linnea? Once Art reached this point, he was aware he was doing Louise’s dirty work for her, creating scenarios of fault and blame, and she was wrong about the guilt, it did stay with him, but eventually it circled back into anger.

He said, “Look, I’m either good enough for her, or I’m not. I guess you think I am. I guess you need my help. So if you want me to even consider it, how about you be a little nicer?”

“All right, OK then, sorry—” Louise started out snippy and nasty as before, but here she seemed to swallow down a choking mass of tears, so that words came out clotted and damp. “Such a horrible, horrible thing . . . and she won’t let anything get better. She tried to hurt . . . hurt . . .”

“Take it easy,” Art said. “Hurt who, what did she do?”

“My little boy. She
loves
him, the two of them were always so great together, and then she . . .”

“What?”
said Art, as Louise started in bawling again. “Come on, calm down.” She wasn’t calming down.

Didn’t it always end up with tears, Louise crying over something that was traceable, either directly or indirectly, to a defect on his part, and the rest of it felt familiar too, the exhaustion of dealing with her, like one of those waves the ocean heaved up, the ones that clobbered you and knocked you flat and dragged you out to the murky, roiling sea. “What did she do?” he repeated, thinking of all the things a truly disturbed teenager might be capable of.

“We didn’t see her do it, but his little arm was just black and blue. She hates us. We know she does because she tells us. She starts fights at school. She can’t go back there this fall, they won’t let her. She steals money from my purse and lies about it. She steals from stores. We think she uses drugs.”

“What kind of drugs?”

“For God’s sake, Art.”

“No, really, there’s a difference between a little pot and being a raging meth freak. There’s some things you really ought to put people in jail for.”

Louise said, “We can smell the marijuana on her. Don’t start telling me it’s a harmless, natural herb. Fifteen. Years. Old.”

A chip off the old block, Art thought but did not say. Since it seemed like his turn to move the discussion along, he said, “This sounds like a real bad idea, Louise. Her coming here. Seriously, this is the kind of—”

“It was her idea.”

Louise blew her nose, offstage, then came back to the phone. “She says she doesn’t want to have anything more to do with us, and she’s entitled to get to know her own father.”

“She doesn’t think I’m rich or anything, does she?”

“I don’t think she’s laboring under that misapprehension.”

“What have you told her about me, huh?” Louise didn’t answer. “Never mind that one.”

“I’ve tried to talk her out of it, but she has her mind set on it, and honestly, we all need a break from her, it would be a relief, even though that makes me feel horrible, it’s horrible not to want your own child. Oh, sorry. I forgot who I was talking to.”

“If I say yes to this, Louise, and I’m not suggesting I will, you and I have to agree on some ground rules. Like, you can’t call me up all the time just to heap shit on me.”

They hung up. Art spent the next two days thinking gloomy thoughts. He didn’t believe for a minute that Louise wouldn’t sic the lawyers on him, or at least threaten to, or make some other kind of misery for him. There were other times when he tried on some jazzy, offbeat version of fatherhood, something from a quirky movie, but these moments proved difficult to sustain. In the end, it seemed easiest to agree to some kind of quickie visit, and he called Louise back and told her to put Linnea on a plane.

Her flight from Cleveland was on time, the arrival board said, and she had his cell phone number, in case there was any real problem finding each other. Art had come to the airport early and wandered the concourse, taking in its uninteresting restaurants and its gift stores selling Alcatraz T-shirts and sourdough bread, thinking too late that he should have bought Linnea something, flowers maybe, though he wasn’t sure if she was a flowers type of girl.

They’d had one phone conversation before she’d left, and it hadn’t really gotten off the ground. Louise had called him and said, without preamble, “She wants to talk to you. Here.”

Some fumbling around on the other end, a conversation half muffled by someone’s hand, a conversation Art intuited as hostile, the phone reluctantly handed over, then a girl’s voice, light, cool, uninflected. “Hello?”

“Hi, Linnea. It’s nice to be talking to you.”

“Yeah,” she said, unhelpfully.

“I’m glad you’re coming out here.” And at that moment he was; he had some dim sense of at least her ordinary misery, the things she contended with in that house. “Look, don’t worry about anything that’s going on with your mom, I mean anything you’re fighting about. You’re going to come out here and leave all that behind you. Like, a new start. Hey, for me too. Because I haven’t been, you know, much of a dad. So you and me can take it from the top. Get to know each other. Oh, you need to tell me what kind of food you like so I can go shopping. Are you a vegetarian, anything like that? Because I can—”